Crisis looms for Bolivia as glaciers melt

The glaciers in the Andes mountains of Bolivia provide about half the drinking water for two million people down the mountain. But the glaciers are now melting at an unprecedented rate and will be completely gone within 20 years.

The mountain's traditional guardians, the Aymara Indians, say that to ascend this 6,000-metre peak without absolution is to incur the wrath of the gods.

"They're not angry with us, they're telling us something," an Aymara priest says as he gives a blessing to local people.

"We have to live with nature in a balanced way - if we don't pollute more, and if we don't industrialise, if we learn not to pollute we'll be able to live a bit longer."

On the arid western side of the Andes mountain range, snow and ice mean water, and water is life. Now this icy realm is melting before their very eyes.

The Aymara call this place Chacaltaya, meaning "cold road". In modern times Bolivians proudly boasted that this glacier - at nearly 5,500 metres - was the world's highest ski run. But no longer: these days it looks more like a resort on the moon.

Glaciologist Edson Ramirez says the sad sliver of ice that remains will probably be completely gone within two years.

"The ice used to go right down to the road - at the bottom," he said.

Dr Ramirez says people stopped skiing there around 1998. Now should be the peak skiing season, yet there are only rocks.

Bolivia is losing more than its only ski field. Small, high-altitude "tropical glaciers" act as water reservoirs for millions of people who live in arid regions of the Andes. Dr Ramirez says most of the other glaciers in the region are also melting fast.

"I think that around 80 per cent of the glaciers on the Cordillera Real because Chacaltaya is representative of these kind of glaciers," he said.

15 years of research

Dr Ramirez and a team of French scientists have been documenting Chacaltaya's decline for 15 years. At first their observations were treated with scepticism. Now, their glacier has become a cause celebre of the international global warming debate.

"We can observe this kind of melt since the 80s - the dramatic melt of this kind of glacier, the small glaciers," he said.

In 1998 when this ski lift finally shut down, Chacaltaya was still 15 metres thick and losing one metre a year. That rate has since accelerated dramatically.

Dr Ramirez says Chacaltaya is now only three or four metres thick. The ice would be 18,000 years old, but he expects all the glaciers around La Paz will be gone in 20 years' time.

For two million people living under the mountains in the cities of La Paz and El Alto, that means losing up to 60 per cent of their water, which comes from glaciers. It is a huge dilemma for the entire Andes region, potentially effecting tens of millions of people.

"It's a critical problem - it's the same problem for Peru, Ecuador and Colombia - all the Andes," Dr Ramirez said.

In downtown La Paz there is no sense of a looming crisis. Nor is there any evidence of water restrictions. With five governments in just five years, crisis management is the norm - dealing with today's problems, without worrying about next year.

But a few people do worry. High above the city Dr Ramirez studies satellite imagery, plotting the glaciers' decline and the looming water crisis.

He says demand for water is likely to exceed supply in 2009.

Global carbon emissions

Andes glaciers have all been in slow decline since a mini-ice age here about 300 years ago, but the meltdown is has accelerated relatively recently. Dr Ramirez says man-made carbon emissions are a factor in the melting of the glaciers.

"What we haven't been able to do so far is measure the proportion of human contribution to global warming. But we do know the effects of human activities accelerate or have the role of a catalyst in this cycle."

He says the glaciers have been hit hardest by an unprecedented number of El Nino events - complex weather cycles triggered by warming and cooling of water at opposite ends of the Pacific Ocean.

"The hot air that's in Australia moves towards the Peruvian Pacific coast," he said.

"The effect means that for the Andean Mountains, especially in Bolivia, there's low cloud, and consequently low rainfall and high radiation and so the glacier as we see here loses its capacity to reflect radiation."

Low rainfall means less snow, and it is snow which both replenishes the glacier and protects the ice from the harsh sun at such high altitude.

Without the glaciers, scientists worry that the Andes highlands will have to depend on just 400mm of rain each year. Then there is the problem of electricity. Sitting atop the spine of the Andes, a hydro-electric dam generates 80 per cent of La Paz's power. It relies mainly on glacier run-off to drive the turbines. No water means no electricity.

"The system of water provision for El Alto might collapse in the next two or three years," he said.

Building dams in this earthquake-prone zone would be too complex and expensive, and it is also not economically viable to pump water up from Bolivia's distant Amazon basin, which receives a massive five metres of rain annually.

Mr Gonzales says it is unfair that Bolivia will pay such a heavy price for a problem created by the industrialised world.

"The national greenhouse gas emissions is about 0.03 per cent of global emissions, but we have to bear the consequences of global warming," he said.

"I'm very pessimistic of the situation at the international level. We know very well the solution comes through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But not every country is committed to do this.

"The problem is being produced by industrial nations - and we are facing the problems, we are facing the consequences."

Impact on the poor

La Paz's twin city is El Alto, a vast slum area that is home to more than a million people, mostly indigenous. As changing weather patterns cause crops to fail on the Andes high plain, they have been drawn to the city in search of work. The population is set to double in the next decade.

Local woman Berna Cabrera says water - or the lack of it - has always been an issue here.

"There's no water, there's nowhere to get it from. They bring it from the Chocaya river and that water is dirty and they bring it here to sell in the community where they live," she said.

A single mother, Ms Cabrera works as a nanny down in La Paz to support three generations of her family. She considers herself fortunate in having a job. Still, family discussion often centres on where they will get that basic necessity needed to sustain life.

"We use it in cups because at times we don't cook because we don't have any water," she said.

"When it rains for us it's pure happiness because the water falls down from the gutters. We receive the containers, we put it into our wash tubs and with that water the children wash and we eat."

Like most Bolivians, Ms Cabrera has never expected much help from the Government. At a typical community meeting, people are worried that there is just one tap for 200 people and their livestock.

Water is already expensive, and with the glaciers melting, local people are acutely aware that the price will rise even further. Some fear water will soon cost more than soft drink.

For the first time in Bolivia's history an Aymara Indian, Evo Morales, holds the office of president - yet Ms Cabrera doubts that even he can help them.

"No government has ever been concerned about us, to tell you the truth, no one has ever worried about water and nobody has ever come to ask about our problems with water," she said.

For the people of El Alto, global warming is more than an abstract political debate.

World leaders can argue about the cause and establish a complex system of carbon emissions trading, but Bolivians face the very real risk of becoming casualties of climate change.

'Bolivian Meltdown' is on Foreign Correspondent at 9:20pm tonight on ABC TV.